Jesse Liberty comes through with his impressions of Visual Studio .NET 2005, the next release of .NET from Microsoft.

What's New in Beta 2: Web Parts Revisited
Jesse Liberty has been working with Whidbey (.NET 2005) for a little over a year, and believes that .NET 2005 2.0 is a great improvement over 1.x. That said, the beta has had a bit of a hard time settling down, and so many of the earlier columns he wrote about Whidbey are, at best, a bit out of date. In this column he revisits, fixes, and expands on one of his favorite 2.0 features: Web Parts. Jun. 13, 2005

Putting a Browser into Your Windows Application
There are times when it would be convenient to have the capabilities of Internet Explorer inside your Windows application. The classic case is when you want to look at an XML document, and you'd like to take advantage of IE's ability to show the document as a collapsible and expandable hierarchy. In this article, Jesse Liberty will show you how to do that, in just a few easy steps. May. 10, 2005

XML DataSource Controls in .NET 2.0
With .NET 2.0's XML DataSource control, you can bind to an XML document just as easily as you bind to tables in a database. If the XML document you load is hierarchical, the data is exposed hierarchically, which makes it ideal for mapping an XML document to a TreeView control. Jesse Liberty explains how the XML DataSource works in ASP.NET. Apr. 18, 2005

Enhanced Text Input in Windows Forms 2.0
Visual Studio 2005 provides enhanced controls for managing data input in Whidbey. To get you started, Jesse Liberty takes a look at the masked editing control, which allows you to restrict the input from a user that a Windows Form will accept and to control how it is displayed by using a mask. Mar. 28, 2005

Data Binding in ASP.NET 2.0
Not only has Microsoft made radical changes in how data binding is done between ASP.NET 1.x and 2.0, but it has also created significant differences between how it is done in Windows Forms and ASP.NET in 2.0. This keeps life interesting (Jesse Liberty says, gnashing his teeth). In this new column, he dives into data binding in the new Web Forms. Feb. 22, 2005

Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0
In a previous article, Jesse Liberty discussed how personalization works. This article picks up from where he left off and shows you how to use Web Parts to allow your users to further personalize users' interactions with your web site. Jan. 10, 2005

Skins and Themes
In his previous column, Jesse Liberty showed you how to use web forms security to create a personalized site. Here, he builds on that work to introduce the concepts of skins and themes, which allow users to configure the look and feel of your site. Nov. 15, 2004

ASP.NET 2.0 Databinding
In ASP.NET 2.0, a great deal of the ADO.NET object model has been incorporated into controls that let you interact with data declaratively, and that spare you from writing boilerplate code to create datasets, extract tables, bind tables or views to controls, and so forth. Jesse Liberty shows you how ADO.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 are now meaningfully matched. Nov. 8, 2004

Personalization in ASP.NET 2.0
In previous articles, Jesse discussed security and managing users' roles. This article picks up from where those articles left off, and show you how to provide personalized web pages for your users. Personalization allows your web site to welcome the user and to persist the user's state. Oct. 25, 2004

Master Pages in ASP.NET
On many web sites, it is important to achieve a consistent "look and feel" as the user moves from page to page. While this was possible with .NET 1.1, it was difficult and required both programmer and designer discipline. ASP.NET 2.0 makes this far easier with the creation of master pages. Jesse Liberty shows you how master pages work in ASP.NET 2.0. Sep. 27, 2004

Rapid Application Development with VB.NET 2.0
For a couple of years now, Jesse Liberty been touting the Microsoft endorsed-sentiment that it really doesn't matter if you program in C# or in VB.NET, since both are just syntactic sugar layered on top of MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language, the true language of .NET). That appears to be changing a bit with Whidbey. Jesse Liberty investigates the new My object in VB.NET 2.0. Aug. 2, 2004

ASP.NET Forms Security, Part 2
In his previous column, Jesse Liberty showed how to add web form security to your ASP.NET 2.0 application, and how to add users. In this follow-up, he demonstrates how easy it is to create and manage roles. Jun. 28, 2004

C# Iterators
If you are creating a class that looks and behaves like a collection, it is handy to allow your users to iterate through the
members of your collection with the foreach statement. This is easier to do in C# 2.0 than it is in 1.1. In this new column by Jesse Liberty, he shows you what is coming up in .NET 2.0 to make this common task easier. Jun. 7, 2004

C# Generics
The single most anticipated (and dreaded?) feature of Visual C# 2.0 is the addition of Generics. Jesse Liberty shows you what problems Generics solve, how to use them to improve your code, and why you need not fear them. May. 17, 2004

DataGrids, Improved
In Jesse Liberty's book Programming ASP.NET, he was unable to begin the discussion of DataGrids without first describing, in some detail, the ADO.NET object model, including DataAdapters, DataTables, DataSets and DataReaders. In this, the first column on Whidbey, he shows how to use Whidbey's new ASP.NET DataGrids. Apr. 19, 2004